This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have ...
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This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. It is a sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities — including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians, and Indonesian migrants — negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.Less

As Normal as Possible : Negotiating Sexuality and Gender in Mainland China and Hong Kong

Ching Yau

Published in print: 2010-06-01

This volume poses new challenges to queer studies and demonstrates the study of Chinese sexuality as an emergent field currently emanating from multiple disciplines. Issues related to sexuality have acquired a new visibility in China in the past several years. The growth of religious fundamentalists and global gay discourses, heightened media attention and even more intense censorship, LBGTIQ activist movements, and the struggles of sex workers, have all contributed to this visibility. There is an urgent need for intellectual work to articulate and analyze the complexity of issues of sexuality, and the ways in which different norms line up and become synonymous with one another, in order to build situated knowledge in strengthening the discursive power of non-normative sexual-subjects-in-alliance. This book showcases the work of scholars working mostly outside Euro-America and focuses on cities including Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Beijing. It is a sustained collections on Chinese non-normative sexual subjectivities and contemporary sexual politics published in English. It highlights the various ways in which different individuals and communities — including male sex workers, transsexual subjects, lesbians, and Indonesian migrants — negotiate with notions of normativity and modernity, fine-tuned according to the different power structures of each context, and making new and different meanings.

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different ...
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This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents.Less

The Asian Modern : Culture, Capitalist Development, Singapore

C. J. W.-L. Wee

Published in print: 2007-10-01

This book is an account of how the modernization processes for postcolonial societies in Asia such as India, Malaysia, and Singapore are fraught with collaborations and conflicts between different socio-political, historical, economic, and cultural agents.

Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an ...
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Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an investment to gain “beauty capital” to increase opportunities for social and career success. Building on rich ethnographic data, this book presents the perspectives of women who have undergone cosmetic surgery, illuminating the aspirations behind their choices. The author explores how turbulent economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China since the 1980s have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in gender studies, China studies, anthropology and sociology of the body, and cultural studies.Less

Buying Beauty : Cosmetic Surgery in China

WEN Hua

Published in print: 2013-01-01

Cosmetic surgery in China has grown rapidly in recent years of dramatic social transition. Facing fierce competition in all spheres of daily life, more and more women consider cosmetic surgery as an investment to gain “beauty capital” to increase opportunities for social and career success. Building on rich ethnographic data, this book presents the perspectives of women who have undergone cosmetic surgery, illuminating the aspirations behind their choices. The author explores how turbulent economic, socio-cultural and political changes in China since the 1980s have produced immense anxiety that is experienced by women both mentally and physically. This book will appeal to readers who are interested in gender studies, China studies, anthropology and sociology of the body, and cultural studies.

This volume contains published articles by the author, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the post-war period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the ...
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This volume contains published articles by the author, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the post-war period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong set a high standard for urban anthropology, and helped create the fields of migration studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology.Less

Marjorie Topley

Published in print: 2011-01-01

This volume contains published articles by the author, who was a pioneer in the field of social anthropology in the post-war period and also the first president of the revived Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society. Her ethnographic research in Singapore and Hong Kong set a high standard for urban anthropology, and helped create the fields of migration studies, gender studies, and medical anthropology.

Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction ...
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Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction with international norms of celebrity production. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, the Internet); official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. The breadth of inquiry here illuminates the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China.Less

Celebrity in China

Louise EdwardsElaine Jeffreys

Published in print: 2010-02-01

Celebrity is a pervasive aspect of everyday life and a growing field of academic inquiry. This is a book-length exploration of celebrity culture in the People's Republic of China and its interaction with international norms of celebrity production. The book comprises case studies from popular culture (film, music, dance, literature, the Internet); official culture (military, political, and moral exemplars) and business celebrities. The breadth of inquiry here illuminates the ways capitalism and communism converge in the elevation of particular individuals to fame in contemporary China.

This book offers a bridge into the critical understanding of modern Chinese art through its encounter with the world beyond China's borders. It demonstrates Chinese art's interconnections with ...
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This book offers a bridge into the critical understanding of modern Chinese art through its encounter with the world beyond China's borders. It demonstrates Chinese art's interconnections with Western cultures while exploring its inherited cultural traditions and internal historical change. The first section deals with the cross-cultural trajectories of individual Chinese artists who travelled from China to the West and then returned. In the second section, the focus shifts from the movement of individual artists between cultures to the process by which specific genres of Western art have been interpreted by Chinese artists. The final section illuminates the encounter of cultures via visual representations of Macau and Hong Kong.Less

Chinese Art and Its Encounter with the World

David Clarke

Published in print: 2011-10-04

This book offers a bridge into the critical understanding of modern Chinese art through its encounter with the world beyond China's borders. It demonstrates Chinese art's interconnections with Western cultures while exploring its inherited cultural traditions and internal historical change. The first section deals with the cross-cultural trajectories of individual Chinese artists who travelled from China to the West and then returned. In the second section, the focus shifts from the movement of individual artists between cultures to the process by which specific genres of Western art have been interpreted by Chinese artists. The final section illuminates the encounter of cultures via visual representations of Macau and Hong Kong.

This book examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as ...
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This book examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as films, popular fiction, food, and fashion cultures, the book challenges the dominant tendency in contemporary cultural politics to define Chinese femininity from a mainland perspective that furthermore equates it with notions of primitivism. Rather, it argues for a radical reconfiguration of the concept of exoticism as a frame for understanding these new representations. The study raises questions on the relationship between the Chinese diasporas and gender, and provides a critical intervention into the current visualizations of diasporic Chinese femininity. It contends that an analysis of such images can inform the reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia, and the West in the context of contemporary globalization, and in turn takes these new intersections to account for the complex nature of modern definitions of diasporic Chinese femininity.Less

The Chinese Exotic : Modern Diasporic Femininity

Olivia Khoo

Published in print: 2007-10-01

This book examines new representations of diasporic Chinese femininity emerging from Asia Pacific modernities since the late twentieth century. Through an analysis of cultural artefacts such as films, popular fiction, food, and fashion cultures, the book challenges the dominant tendency in contemporary cultural politics to define Chinese femininity from a mainland perspective that furthermore equates it with notions of primitivism. Rather, it argues for a radical reconfiguration of the concept of exoticism as a frame for understanding these new representations. The study raises questions on the relationship between the Chinese diasporas and gender, and provides a critical intervention into the current visualizations of diasporic Chinese femininity. It contends that an analysis of such images can inform the reconfigured relations between China, the Chinese diasporas, Asia, and the West in the context of contemporary globalization, and in turn takes these new intersections to account for the complex nature of modern definitions of diasporic Chinese femininity.

Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid ...
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Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid face-painting and exquisite costumes. First experiences of Chinese opera can be baffling because its vocabulary of stagecraft is familiar only to the seasoned aficionado. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft makes the experience more accessible for everyone. This book uses breath-taking images of Chinese opera in performance by Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai to illustrate and explain Chinese opera stage technique. The book explores costumes, gestures, mime, acrobatics, props and stage techniques. Each explanation is accompanied by an example of its use in an opera and is illustrated by in-performance photographs. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft provides the reader with a basic grammar for understanding uniquely Chinese solutions to staging drama.Less

Chinese Opera : The Actor's Craft

Siu Wang-Ngai

Published in print: 2013-12-01

Chinese opera embraces over 360 different styles of theatre that make one of the richest performance arts in the world. It combines music, speech, poetry, mime, acrobatics, stage fighting, vivid face-painting and exquisite costumes. First experiences of Chinese opera can be baffling because its vocabulary of stagecraft is familiar only to the seasoned aficionado. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft makes the experience more accessible for everyone. This book uses breath-taking images of Chinese opera in performance by Hong Kong photographer Siu Wang-Ngai to illustrate and explain Chinese opera stage technique. The book explores costumes, gestures, mime, acrobatics, props and stage techniques. Each explanation is accompanied by an example of its use in an opera and is illustrated by in-performance photographs. Chinese Opera: The Actor's Craft provides the reader with a basic grammar for understanding uniquely Chinese solutions to staging drama.

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes in the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the ...
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Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes in the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the official promotion of Main Melody films, and the emergence and growth of popular cinema. The image of Feng that emerges in the book is of a filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a personal socio-political agenda. In keeping with this reality, the book approaches Feng as a special kind of film auteur, whose works must be interpreted with attention to the specific social and political context of contemporary China.Less

The Cinema of Feng Xiaogang : Commercialization and Censorship in Chinese Cinema after 1989

Rui Zhang

Published in print: 2008-09-01

Beginning first as a case study of Feng Xiaogang, this book explores Chinese film history since the early 1990s in terms of changes in the Communist Party's film policy, industry reforms, the official promotion of Main Melody films, and the emergence and growth of popular cinema. The image of Feng that emerges in the book is of a filmmaker working under political and economic pressures in a post-socialist state while still striving to create works with a personal socio-political agenda. In keeping with this reality, the book approaches Feng as a special kind of film auteur, whose works must be interpreted with attention to the specific social and political context of contemporary China.

Dense living conditions in Hong Kong do not provide much privacy for lesbians and other sexual minorities living with their families. As a result, lesbians often locate alternative spaces to develop ...
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Dense living conditions in Hong Kong do not provide much privacy for lesbians and other sexual minorities living with their families. As a result, lesbians often locate alternative spaces to develop support networks with other women. Others reject the notion of lesbian spaces and instead assert their visibility in different aspects of everyday life. Based on life-history interviews with several dozen lesbians living in Hong Kong, this book maps the complex relations between personal subjectivities and spatialities as they emerge and interact with various social-justice movements and alternative communities. It explores how the impossibly dense spaces of neoliberal Hong Kong enable and curtail the emergence of lesbian life.Less

Conditional Spaces : Hong Kong Lesbian Desires and Everyday Life

Denise Tse-Shang Tang

Published in print: 2011-08-19

Dense living conditions in Hong Kong do not provide much privacy for lesbians and other sexual minorities living with their families. As a result, lesbians often locate alternative spaces to develop support networks with other women. Others reject the notion of lesbian spaces and instead assert their visibility in different aspects of everyday life. Based on life-history interviews with several dozen lesbians living in Hong Kong, this book maps the complex relations between personal subjectivities and spatialities as they emerge and interact with various social-justice movements and alternative communities. It explores how the impossibly dense spaces of neoliberal Hong Kong enable and curtail the emergence of lesbian life.

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